Motoring technology features through time

1 month ago

Cars have
become so technically advanced that many of us take a lot of the features
included in our vehicles as standard for granted today. However, it wasn’t that
long ago that drivers had to get from A to B without many of these handy and
beneficial elements. Just where did the ideas for technology in our vehicles
come from? Used Land Rover stockist
Grange investigates…

Bluetooth

So many of
us will now switch on the Bluetooth capabilities on our smartphone to play
songs on our devices through our car speakers or make phone calls entirely
hands free.

However,
the name Bluetooth was only officially adopted in 1998 and the first handset
using the technology was only shipped in 2000 — it would be another year before
Bluetooth hands-free car kits started to hit the market too.

We must go
a little further back to understand exactly where the concept of Bluetooth came
from though. It was back in 1993 that Jaap Haartsen was employed as a wireless
communications engineer for the Swedish digital communications company
Ericsson. While in this job, Haartsen received the task to create a short-range
radio connection that could enable new functionalities for mobile phones.

By 1995,
fellow wireless communications engineer Sven Mattisson joined Haartsen and the
duo were successful at creating multi-communicator links. Haartsen wasn’t
finished yet though, with his work becoming more focused on piconet networks —
a single piconet being the linking of two Bluetooth-enabled devices in order to
establish an ad-hoc, short-range wireless network.

Heading
into 1998, Haartsen left Ericsson and helped to set up the Bluetooth Special
Interest Group. Over the next two years, he was the chairman of the SIG’s air
protocol certifications group and played a part in standardizing the Bluetooth
radio communications protocol.

Wondering
where the name Bluetooth actually came from? Well, MC Link just didn’t seem to
have a ring to it. Therefore, Jim Kardach, the head of technological development
at Intel, proposed the moniker that we all know the technology by today in
reference to the Danish king, King Harald Blatand. Often referred to as Harald
Bluetooth — possibly due to his penchant for snacking on blueberries — the
monarch was responsible for uniting the warring factions in what is now known
as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The idea is that Bluetooth technology shares a
similar trait in that it unites devices from competing manufacturers, such as a
mouse made by Microsoft with a computer developed by Apple.

Cruise Control

We don’t
know what’s more surprising about how cruise control came to be — the fact the
idea was first thought about during the 1940s or that it was invented by
someone who couldn’t actually drive!

That’s
right; inventor and automotive hall of famer Ralph Teetor was the brains behind
a system where the speed of a vehicle is automatically controlled with a flick
of a switch or press of a button. However, he had been blind since the age of
five after a shop accident.

A lack of
sight didn’t stop Teetor from noticing that when his lawyer was behind the
wheel of a vehicle, he had a tendency to slow down when he was talking and then
speed up if he was listening. Teetor found this inconsistency annoying, to the
point that he started to look into whether a device could be developed which
could control the speed of a car automatically.

While the
first patent for this type of technology was filed in 1948, it would take a few
additional patents for improving the original gadget and close to a decade
after the initial patent before cruise control technology was fitted to the
1958 models of the Chrysler Imperial, New Yorker and Windsor. Of course, from
that point on the devices began to be used by so many manufacturers on their
vehicles.

Sat-nav

Can you
ever imagine driving from A to B along a route that you don’t know without a
polite-sounding android advising you on the roads you should be on? However, it
was only a couple of decades ago that motorists had to memorize directions
before they got behind the wheel, or at least had a collection of fold-out maps
in their glovebox to analyse whenever they took a break from driving.

We have to look towards the US military to understand the
origins of sat-nav. This was because it was the US Department of Defense which
developed the first satellite-based global positioning technology on behalf of
the country’s military forces. Deemed TRANSIT, it was up and running as we
entered the 1960s and involved the system using the DopplerEffect to calculate
the position of the receiver in relation to satellites. As satellites could
follow fixed trajectories at calculable speeds, scientists were able to use
this data to pinpoint positions based upon short-term variations in frequency.

More refined and precise versions of this satellite-based
global positioning technology was used by the general military as we progressed
into the early 1980s, whereby multiple satellites were utilised. While GPS
devices were also publicly available around this time — systems which use
between 24 and 32 medium Earth orbit satellites that follow six trajectories
for incredibly accurate results — they weren’t of much use. This is because the
military added interference to the signals so that only their own version could
be used with any precision.

As we ushered in a new millennium though, this would change
as President Clinton ended four years of deliberations to sign a bill in 2000
which ordered that the military ceased scrambling satellite signals that were
being used by members of the public. The era of consumer-based sat-nav systems
had begun.

It makes for an intriguing thought about not only what the
next advancement in motoring tech will be, but whether such technology is
already being tested or even used by other industries across the globe!